The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Furthermore, Goldin-Meadow has found, learners who produce such speech-gesture mismatches are especially receptive to instruction—ready to absorb and apply the correct knowledge, should a parent or teacher supply it. Even adults signal their readiness to learn through mismatches between what they’re saying and how their hands are moving. In one experiment, for example, a group of college students was asked to learn about a set of “stereoisomers”—chemical compounds that feature the same number of atoms but that differ from one another in the way the atoms are spatially arranged. The extent to which the undergraduates made gesture-speech mismatches while learning “predicted their ability to profit from instruction,” writes Goldin-Meadow, who was lead author of the study. “Namely, the more they expressed correct conceptual information in gesture that they did not verbalize in speech, the more they were subsequently able to learn.” When our words and our movements diverge, it’s our gestures that signal what happens next.